Big Yellow Taxi
by Fic Fairy
Summary: Holby City Connie Other. A one shot dealing with Connie's confused feelings for a completely unobtainable individual. FF herein.


There are some words better left unspoken, feelings that should never be expressed or acted on. Be it the love I thought I felt for the father of my unborn child, that I dared not speak of for the simple reason that I knew it was unrequited, or the sense of extreme pain and heartache that consumed me at the loss of my husband, I've long known that it's better to keep my mouth shut, be it to avoid the humiliation and pity, for the sake of the quiet life, or because I know how dangerous it would be to look back.

But the way I feel about her is a different matter entirely. It's not that I won't talk about it, it's that I can't. How could I for one second even begin to explain it, when I don't understand it myself. 

I don't even understand where it came from., exactly when I crossed that line from friendship to a sense of deeper feeling… to love?

The question mark is deliberate. I don't know if it's love, and even if it is I don't know to what extent. Did I love her? Was I in love with her? It's not something I can easily define. I just know it's that since her death I've been able to think of nothing else. No one else.

It's all about her. About Gina.

If you're struggling with this concept, this pairing, just try for one second to put yourself in my shoes. Put yourself where I was, after Switzerland, consumed by an overwhelming sense of grief that far outweighed anything I've felt in the entirety of my adult life. Yes, I've suffered over the years but never like this.

Home alone, curled up in my bed, I tried my hardest to understand the reasons why. Her death was traumatic, possibly the most traumatic I've experienced in all my years in medicine, and not just because I was on the inside instead of the out. That said, it was no excuse for what I was feeling, for the fact that the grief was near as damn it tearing me to pieces. I told myself I was being ridiculous, that I needed to pull myself together. I even tried to console myself with a lie - telling myself, as I once told her, that we weren't that close. It didn't help. We were close, we bonded from the moment we met, alike and yet different in ways that brought us together, to say otherwise was completely untrue.

I had to face it. We were close, but she was gone, and I was lost without her.

It was on that cheery little note that I eventually cried myself to sleep.

And it was once sleep came that things got really complicated…

In my slumber, my dreamland she was back at my side, and not just alive but well too; the illness that had plagued her, eaten away at her, for all the time I'd know her was gone.

I remember the dream perfectly, second by second. The way she drew me to her, brought her lips to my neck. The gentle kisses that were little more than her breath against my skin. And then as we stared at each other, as if seeing each other for the first time, our lips met in a kiss that haunts me to this day for the pure and simple reason that I need to experience it for real. My life can not, and will not be complete until I do.

It was just the kiss that night, but it was enough to shake my fragile belief of what I knew to be true of myself. I'm not gay, I never purported to be, nor wanted to be but from that night to this she is all I want. It's dizzying, its scary and its confusing but it's undeniably true. Screw Sam, f u c k Michael. As I said, it's all about her now.

At first I refused to believe it, put it down to the grief, to temporary insanity, but as the dream grew with each night that passed to the levels of eroticism that I didn't even know existed it became undeniable, especially when she was invading my thoughts day as well as night.

You see a dream can be excused. A dream is subconscious. When you're sat in a Board Meeting passing the time by readily imagining how it would have been, how could have been if you'd had chance to make love to her just one time, then really its not something you can deny.

Do I feel guilty about it? Yes, and no. The fact that she's gone doesn't make it feel wrong. I am not fantasising about making love to her corpse - quite the opposite. I want her living and breathing, capable of responding to my touch and pleasuring me with her own. I want to be with her, I want to make her smile, what could possibly be unnatural about that.

The guilt comes from somewhere else entirely.

Elliot.

I wanted to look after him, in spite of her insistence that he'd drive me mad, but all this has really put pay to that. How do you look a man in the eye when every single one of your spare moments, waking or otherwise revolve around the fantasy of being with his wife. Making her your own.

There have even been times in the last few weeks where I've become convinced that he knows, been concerned that it's written all over my face. Only a couple days ago he caught me in our office, deep in thought, mentally safe in her arms, and, as if he could read my mind he uttered the words I least wanted to hear.

"You're thinking about her."

I said nothing. What could I say? My deer trapped in the headlights look gave me clean away. But luckily it was a look that could be interpreted in more ways than one and Elliot immediately harked back to Switzerland, to what we did, unaware that as far as Gina and I's relationship goes that one day was really only the tip of the iceberg. And why would he know? Why would he even suspect? Why would anyone? Who could ever believe that the Connie Beauchamp, an individual with a freezer unit where her heart should be could fall head over heels in love with anyone - let alone another woman. I sometimes find it impossible to believe myself.

But how do you deny the irrefutable?

And slowly, I'm coming to terms with it, with this strange and bizarre form of love that can't really be explained. It's seeming less and less strange that in my mind I know the contours of 'her' body even better than I know my own. And, when I find myself inexplicably in tears over her death for the millionth time in a day, I no longer chastise myself but recognise the pain. I've lost a lover, in thought even if not in deed, why should it be wrong to cry over that?

The big question though, I suppose, is whether it ever could actually have happened for us, and quite aside from the fact that it would never have occurred to me to want it to had I not lost her, I can say in complete certainty that the answer is no. She and Elliot were not like Michael and I. Their relationship was stronger than anything we ever had. She'd never have taken me as a lover on the side, and if I'm honest, I wouldn't have wanted her to, because if she had, and I ended up feeling this way, it would never have been enough.

In short, I'd have wanted to have been the love of her life. And I wasn't. Elliot was.

And I know this sounds awful, but I've had moments, childish pathetic moments where I've detested him for that. Admittedly I've usually been drunk at the time; sat on my sofa under a blanket and the influence of several whiskeys that I shouldn't have drank in the first place, bemoaning to the four walls of my living room the injustice of the fact the he was the one who met her at medical school and not me. I have a whole scenario created in my mind whereby they managed to miss each other and later, I, as fresher get my chance one night in a squalid student bar where we hook up before ending up back at her digs, making love and sealing the deal on a relationship that would last forever, or whatever forever is in a world where God only gives the good people the challenges; where intelligent, compassionate, loving women with so much to give are left with no choice but to end their lives before the Motor Neurone Disease does.

But it's just a dream, and one that stands no chance of coming to fruition, she's not mine - never would have been, never will be. It's infatuation, a representation of grief, pregnancy hormones gone mad; and I need to accept that, concentrate on my child and move on. Logic says that.

Unfortunately logic doesn't allow for the fact that I don't want to say goodbye.

Logic doesn't allow for that kiss.

Logic doesn't allow for loving Gina…


End file.
